The Survival of Roaches. Kafka in Cuba in the Late 20th Century – Irina Garbatzky

Abstract || This article explores three receptions of Kafka in Cuba during the eighties and nineties. It establishes a sequence between Reinaldo Arenas' essay about Virgilio Piñera, “La isla en peso con todas sus cucarachas”, and the poetry and prose of Rolando Sánchez Mejías and Carlos A. Aguilera, and their texts in Diáspora(s), the publication that they coordinated between 1997 and 2002. If Kafka’s work affords a type of thought that questions human boundaries (Yelin, 2015), I hold that the reading of Kafka in the literature of these authors sets up an anomalous writer’s figure (the bug-writer), a particularly relevant issue in the context of the crisis of the figure of the Hombre Nuevo (New Man), while it also opens new cartographies for the Cuban imaginary.